What is the purpose of homeschooling? Is the purpose excellence in education? Is the purpose sheltering of the children? Is the purpose of homeschooling because the family is all important? Is the purpose of homeschooling because to do so is cool? Is it because we don’t have enough money to send our kids to private school? Is it because that is just what we are supposed to do? Or is it because children shouldn’t be educated unless they ask to be?
These and many more reasons are not good, Biblical reasons for homeschooling.
I was in a private Christian school through the 4th grade, as grading systems go. I was a straight “A” student. I remember I once got a “B” and I was horrified. My parents were determined that I would not go to public school because of their own experience in that system. The corruption, the ungodly things they learned from the other kids and from the teachers as well. The problem was that as I was to be entering the 5th grace, and my sister would have been entering the 2nd grade, my parents discovered that they did not have enough money to continue to pay for our tuition. So they decided to homeschool us because they felt public school was not an option. And that is to be commended.
It was not until a few years later that my parents began to see the real reason for homeschooling. Ultimately, the real reason was that they felt homeschooling to be the best means available to them for providing their children with good, God honoring education. They saw it as a way they could teach us when they were sitting down, rising up, walking by the way, they were in complete control over what I was being taught. They were in control of the perspectives we were being taught, the motives for the teaching, the theories, they were in charge of everything.
But there is a problem among the homeschool community. The distinction is that of what Douglas Wilson refers to as Homeschoolers, and Homers. Homers place the highest and utmost importance on the family. The family should never be split apart so they must do everything together. In some extremes, the children must all do Kindergarten together, 1st grade together, and so on. If the children play with friends, they must play with friends all together. Above all, the family must not be separated from each other for any reason. They worship the family as their god. This means (in some cases I have known) that 15 or 16 year old Johnny can’t go help Joe Moe hang drywall down the street unless the whole family goes. This means that Daddy can’t go out to make a living unless the whole family goes. In their view there is to be no distinction between ages because age segregation is just bad and evil, an invention from the pit of hell itself.
The problem with all this is that it is not Biblical. Biblically, the family ranks as very important, but does not occupy the highest and most important place. And indeed the family is split and splintered and fragmented in today’s modern culture, but Homers have a knee jerk reaction to this and carry it to an extreme. We should feel it a good thing if 15 or 16 year old Johnny goes of down the road to help Joe hang his drywall. And no matter what your view on the industrial revolution, we should view it as a good thing that daddy is out being the breadwinner and not making his wife or children fill that role so that “he can be home with the family”.
And Biblically, age segregation is a must. The Bible itself age segregates when it addresses a particular age group. “Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right.” Ephesians 6:1. And there are other types of segregation when the Bible specifically addresses women, such as older women must teach the younger women. That is gender segregation.
To be sure, in today’s culture we are segregated to death, to the point that we can’t even go to church and worship together. And to that point that children must be with their own age group in order to play together and get along together. This ought not to be. But again, the Homers assume a complete knee jerk reaction to an ungodly society.
The right and Biblical reason for homeschooling is because God commands parents to train their children, and to raise them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. That’s almost, if not entirely impossible to do in the public school. The principle is that parents are responsible and ultimately answerable before God for the training of the children God has given them. This does not mean that we cannot delegate certain teaching to teachers. For example, both myself, and my wife would be completely unqualified to teach our children how to pay the violin. Neither of us play one, and we would therefore not be able teach our children how to play one. If one of our children (providing the Lord blesses us with children) expresses an interest in learning to play the violin, and if we have the means, we cannot deny it to them only on the basis that we can’t delegate the responsibility of teaching to someone else. That’s silliness, and yet I know Christian homeschoolers who would say just that. Now, we are responsible for what the teacher we hire teaches of course.
The principle I am trying to communicate here is that of Christian discipleship. Not excellence in education, or any of the other reasons I mentioned at the beginning of this post. The reason for everything we do should be Biblical. Homeschooling for the wrong reasons is still homeschooling for the wrong reasons no matter which way you slice it.
